New screens and details for Vampyr emerge

Being a vampire in 1918, flu-stricken London isn’t a simple task. See how Jonathan Reid deals with his foes in these new screens from Vampyr.

Ah the creatures of the night…

We haven’t heard too much about Vampyr in the recent months since its announcement. Though the game is certainly looking atmospheric, and plenty cool in this new round of screens. There’s a little more info at this point too, as to how main character Reid will be vamping it up around jolly old London.

The big element in combat will apparently be the Blood Gauge. This little gameplay hook will fill up when you “attack and dodge foes”. The dodging is pretty self-explanatory, and basic attacks are staple stuff. You’ll have both melee and ranged weapons at your disposal, like pistols and such. As for the reason that you’re filling that gauge, well that’s a lot more interesting.

Recalling memories of games like Legacy of Kain, you’ll gain access to an array of vampiric powers once your gauge is filled. Developer Dontnod says this is when the vampire starts to overtake the human side of Mr. Reid, and he gets downright supernatural.

Combat styles

You’ll be able to equip whatever powers you like, at any time you like, making custom loadouts of a kind. You can, for instance, create a character who’s more adept in all-out assaults or one who keeps enemies at a distance.

Skills themselves can also be evolved in different ways. The press release gives the example of a skill called Spring. This allows Reid to rush “instantly” up to a baddie who’s not close by. When you get there though, you can either cause area-effect damage, or have temporary invincibility. So while the base skill still does what it does, which of the two results of using it are up to you to decide.

Building your abilities

Since Vampyr is an aRPG, you’ll have to accumulate XP on your adventure. If you don’t, well, you won’t be doing much of the cool stuff that the game has to offer. This isn’t a fantasy world with no repercussions though.

Vampyr’s universe is very much grounded in reality, taking place on the flu-torn streets of London during the 1918 epidemic. If you don’t know, that killed a lot of people even without vampires running around. Reid is also a freshly turned man, who’s still working as a doctor. So you can imagine that there might be some cool story points in there.

Some of those points no doubt have to do with feeding on the civilian population. Yes, you can feed on whoever you want, but there are pros and cons to that. Draining average folks will get you big XP, but also result in “increased danger on the streets, and narrative consequences for the world’s citizens, to name a few”. I imagine that more dead bodies laying around aren’t a good thing.

Players will have to investigate who to feed from, and who to spare, conscious of their need to increase their strength. Jonathan’s Vampire impulses will always be working against his human side.

Quite frankly, all that sounds pretty great. Vampire games are fairly few and far between, and Vampyr seems like it’s set to offer a good deal of interesting evolutions for what could otherwise be a pretty standard horror story.

I’m looking forward to this one, to put it mildly. Vampyr hits the PS4, Xbox One, and PC in early 2017.